Siri's dad speaks for himself

Dag Kittlaus is the co-founder and chief executive of the company that created Siri. He's back in the Midwest.

March 18, 2012|Phil Rosenthal

Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and chief executive of the company that created Siri, is back home in the Midwest. (Dag Kittlaus, HANDOUT)

The first time I ask Siri how to get to Dag Kittlaus' house, Siri hears it as "dog get blouses house." Then Siri tells me there are four nearby kennels. Finally, drawing from my iPhone's contact list, Siri presents three potential routes into the northern suburbs.

Kittlaus is one of Siri's parents.

This connection doesn't seem to be made by the voice-interaction feature that's been the great lure of the iPhone 4S, which Apple introduced last fall to much fanfare. But Siri's hardly alone in not knowing all that much about the youthful, blond 45-year-old.

The co-founder and chief executive of the company that created Siri was keeping a low profile even before October. That's when the 4S launched, and he left California's Silicon Valley and Apple, which acquired his firm a year and a half earlier. He was in pursuit of a more varied environment, literally and figuratively, back home in the Midwest.

Here, he can sit with a laptop on his rooftop perch, watch the storms roll past and develop a weather app as an extension of his meteorology hobby. Here the man who helped bring science-fiction technology into the real world can sketch out the beginnings of his own sci-fi novel. He can clear his head and his vision to better see around corners and over the horizon to problems and solutions others have yet to consider.

It's exactly as he wants, and perhaps needs, for himself, his wife and kids, and his projects just coming into focus but not ready for public discussion.

"I've been dreaming about it since high school, which is to get in a position where everything's on your own terms from that point on," Kittlaus said, poised to enjoy a leisurely sunny afternoon. "It happened when I got off the phone with Steve Jobs, when we agreed on a deal (for Apple to buy the company two years ago). I walked around the city (of San Jose) and just thought about things. … It's liberating."

Kittlaus hails from the Chicago area, growing up in Hinsdale and Michigan City, Ind., as well as his mother's native Norway. He was an entrepreneur at a young age, and he and his brother once came home from an early Taste of Chicago with a big garbage bag full of cash from selling custom T-shirts while still in high school. For a time he made money as a ticket broker.

His education was focused in economics, and he picked up degrees at Indiana University and the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo. He built his own data, voice and Internet company here, then sold it. He rose through Norway's Telenor before coming back to the States and Motorola, where he was described in a 2005 Sun-Times column as "a blond, baby-faced Nordic Brad Pitt" overseeing "arguably the world's most fertile communications idea-factory."

But Kittlaus left Schaumburg-based Motorola for California in 2007, segueing into a partnership that helped create Siri. Adam Cheyer and Tom Gruber brought mobile industry engineering, artificial intelligence and interface design expertise. He brought the inkling of the idea, and together they recruited talent from Google, NASA and elsewhere.

The independence of an entrepreneurial startup, Kittlaus said, is often prerequisite to great innovation.

"You need that separation of focus and motivation that that structure allows for," he said. "Why do big companies need to buy their innovation? Because they suck at it. They get entrenched in their narrow focus of running their own business, and any research that's done on the side is generally trying to feed that into something the company's already doing, as opposed to thinking of new things that don't exist.

"Good investors, they're really not interested in somebody who builds a slightly better mousetrap. They're looking for the people who have the bionic mouse."

When Kittlaus speaks of a future 25 years away with self-driving cars, chromosome manipulation that retards human aging and devices in one's home capable of producing an actual cheeseburger that's attached to an email, he sounds like he's talking about his prospective novel as much as advances in technology and research.

"There's stuff going on now that will blow your mind," Kittlaus said. "The problem is these (research) guys are great at solving technical problems. They're not necessarily great at figuring out what the hell to do with it, so they need someone like me to come in and create a vision around what this technology can do."

So one day the phone rings, and it's Apple boss Jobs. He wants to talk Siri. At his home. The next day.

"Actually, he changed his schedule because I was supposed to take my wife to the ballet," Kittlaus said. "He treated us with respect from the beginning. He had a soft spot in his heart for entrepreneurs."

Or maybe he just understood the role entrepreneurs play in the development ecosystem.